Linked List: July 2012

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

The Apple vs. Samsung trial was always destined to be a circus,
but Samsung’s already causing trouble on the first day of
testimony: Judge Lucy Koh is furious that the company sent the
press rejected evidence after the court overruled repeated
attempts to introduce it at trial.

When we announced Nexus Q at Google I/O, we gave away devices to
attendees for an early preview. The industrial design and hardware
were met with great enthusiasm. We also heard initial feedback
from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does
today. In response, we have decided to postpone the consumer
launch of Nexus Q while we work on making it even better.

No. Absolutely not. No one should own this, no matter their
lifestyle preferences or moral views. I promise you — you won’t
like it. The Sony SmartWatch is pathetic, frustrating, and
empty. There’s no way to justify spending $150 on this — this
ripoff of a thing. It’s easily gulped down at first under the
guise of luxe gadgetry, but spending any more than a few minutes
swiping with despair reveals just how much of a bad practical
joke this thing is.

Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin made a list of potential big acquisitions on which Apple could spend its $117 billion (and growing ever more rapidly) cash hoard:

Nuance

Twitter

Path

RIM

Square

Sprint

The only ones on that list that make sense to me are Nuance (under Apple’s oft-cited rule that the company seeks to “own and control the primary technology” in everything they do — speech recognition is now one of Apple’s primary technologies) and maybe Square.

Acquiring Sprint makes no sense, unless you think of the iPhone and iPad as U.S.-only products, which also makes no sense. I could see Apple buying RIM for its patent portfolio after RIM goes bankrupt, but that’s more likely to happen through a consortium, like the Nortel deal.

Monday, 30 July 2012

The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It’s so weak, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It’s a huge, huge pain.

Can’t say I’ve noticed this with the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but I don’t move that around while charging. Maybe it’s more of a problem with Airs?

Therein lies another problem with this campaign. In the effort to show that the Genius is the most helpful guy in the world, Apple has created customers who, shall we say, are on the dim side. In past ads, Apple has shown “ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” simply because Apple products are so easy to use. Now we have thick people who want to be better, but need a Genius to help. Not exactly flattering.

I’m not defending this aspect of the ads. “These Mac users are pretty dumb” is dangerous territory, no matter how deftly it’s treated. But the idea here is that they’re not supposed to be flattering. The idea is these on-screen Mac users in need of help are supposed to make the viewer at home feel like, “Hey, I’m smarter than that guy.” The idea that these spots insult Mac users’ intelligence reminds me of the misguided criticism that the old “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads were insulting to would-be switchers because Hodgman, the PC, was a doofus.

There’s really no way to evaluate the effectiveness of these spots without talking to people who’ve never bought a Mac but are thinking about buying their first.

Sunday, 29 July 2012

Saturday, 28 July 2012

It’s still a switcher-based game for Apple. In order to increase Mac sales, they have to get people to switch from Windows. Ads like these (if not necessarily these exact ads) are integral to the game plan.

Apple Inc. held discussions with Twitter Inc. more than a year ago about taking a strategic investment in the short-messaging service, according to a person familiar with the talks. People familiar with the matter said there are no current formal investment or acquisition discussions between the companies.

News of the investment talks was first reported by the New York Times.

Reaction on Twitter seems overwhelmingly negative, but I’m not so sure. These spots don’t appeal to me, personally. They’re not cool. But they’re not supposed to be cool, and they’re not targeted at existing Mac users. This is about assuaging the doubts of would-be switchers. If you switch to Mac, we’ll help you. That’s the message.

Update: Not explicitly but implicitly, these are the first TV spots Apple has run for their retail stores, not for products. Daniel Jalkut:

Apple’s store experience is a great competitive advantage, but without ads like these, only existing customers know it.

Apple, which has stumbled in its efforts to get into social media, has talked with Twitter in recent months about making a strategic investment in it, according to people briefed on the matter. […]

Apple has considered an investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars, one that could value Twitter at more than $10 billion, up from an $8.4 billion valuation last year, these people said. They declined to be named because the discussions were private.

Speaking of quarterly profits, my earlier piece on Amazon’s Q3 profit was wrong; I was bamboozled by Tim Carmody’s reporting of their operating profit ($107 million), as opposed to net profit, which was just $7 million.

Not to worry, though. That still compares well to Apple’s $4 million in (per hour) profit for the same quarter.

On Thursday, Amazon reported an operating profit of $107 million
on $12.83 billion in net sales. Last quarter, the company bagged
$192 million on sales of $13.18 billion; a year ago (also a useful
comparison, since retail sales are seasonal), it earned $201
million on sales of $9.91 billion. So even though it sold slightly
less in the quarter, year-over-year, Amazon continues to grow like
gangbusters: 29%, according to the official release.

$107 million in profit for the quarter. That compares well to Apple’s $97 million in profit (per day) for the same quarter.

Update: $107 million was Amazon’s operating profit, not their net profit. See this correction for an accurate comparison to Apple.

John Paczkowski, on Apple’s brief for next week’s trial against Samsung:

In February 2010, Google told Samsung that Samsung’s “P1”
and “P3” tablets (Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1) were “too
similar” to the iPad and demanded “distinguishable design
vis-à-vis the iPad for the P3.”

In 2011, Samsung’s own Product Design Group noted that it is
“regrettable” that the Galaxy S “looks similar” to older
iPhone models.

As part of a formal, Samsung-sponsored evaluation, famous
designers warned Samsung that the Galaxy S “looked like it
copied the iPhone too much,” and that “innovation is
needed.” The designers explained that the appearance of the
Galaxy S “[c]losely resembles the iPhone shape so as to have no
distinguishable elements,” and “[a]ll you have to do is cover
up the Samsung logo and it’s difficult to find anything
different from the iPhone.”

Years passed. Finally, on November 14, 2006, Microsoft introduced
its own music player, called Zune. Fifty-four days later, Steve
Jobs unveiled the iPhone, which combined a mobile phone, a music
player, Internet capability, a camera, and other features not
available on Zune. But the iPod was still around for customers who
didn’t want a phone. In fact, Apple had already introduced its
fifth-generation iPod, its less expensive iPod Mini, and was about
a year away from marketing the least costly of its music players,
the iPod Nano.

Zune was blown away. By 2009, iPod maintained an astonishing 71
percent of the market, the kind of numbers rarely seen anywhere
outside of a North Korean election. Meanwhile, Zune limped along
with less than 4 percent. Last October, Microsoft discontinued it,
in hopes that customers would instead purchase a Windows Phone
that, like the iPhone, has a music player.

Never thought about it that way: by the time Microsoft caught up to the iPod, Apple was on to the iPhone.

At the Black Hat security conference Wednesday, serial Apple and Android hacker Charlie Miller plans to present a grab bag of new tricks that allow him to take complete control of Android and Nokia phones simply by bringing another device or just a chip within a few inches of the target gadget.

E-book and website reading options for Siracusa’s 13th comprehensive review of a major release of Mac OS X. I know I’m not alone in that I look forward to his OS X reviews as much as I do the actual new versions of OS X. An incredible amount of work, and a joy to read.

When, in reality, they had a very good quarter that Wall Street over-estimated. Frankly, the only concerning thing from today’s results was that Apple’s growth was the lowest since 2009. If you want to accentuate the negative, that should be your lede, not that they missed analysts’ estimates.

Tuesday, 24 July 2012

But the big-picture story is that this is a slower period ahead of
the expected new iPhone and potential new iPad this fall (and
maybe someday, a television). Apple’s 23% year-over-year revenue
growth was its slowest since 12% growth in the June 2009 quarter,
and was almost down at Google’s 21% level!

It’s a testimony to just how remarkable Apple’s last few years have been that 23 percent year-over-year growth looks so bad on a chart.

Apple sold 1.3 million Apple TV devices during the June quarter,
an increase of 170 percent over the same quarter a year ago.

That still qualifies as a “hobby,” according to Apple CEO Tim
Cook, who disclosed the number in response to an analyst’s
question on the company’s earnings conference call. But here’s
an interesting data point: Microsoft sold 1.1 million Xbox 360s
worldwide during the same time period.

To the Xbox 360’s credit, it’s nearing the end of its life. But the bottom line is that the battle for the living room is just beginning.

iOS 6 is a lock. A new iPhone is almost for sure coming as well.
New iPod touches and maybe a new iPod nano are likely as well.
There may be a new iMac and/or maybe another Retina MacBook. And
then there’s that iPad mini…

For whatever reason, it appears that Apple is putting all its
chips into the holiday season. You might think that’s because
it’s when sales are the strongest anyway. But it may simply be
because that’s when the products will be done.

Apple’s sales hit $35 billion for the third quarter of 2012, up 22 percent from $28.6 billion last year while profits rose 20.5 to $8.8 billion from $7.3 billion. Earnings for the quarter were $9.32 a share, up 20 percent from last year. Reported earnings topped Apple’s forecast, but fell short of Wall Street expectations of $10.35 per share on projected revenue of $37 billion.

Apple sold 17 million iPads during the quarter, the most the company has ever sold during a quarter. The company tallied June quarter records for both Mac and iPhone sales — the latter figure coming even as customers have held off on purchasing a new iPhone in anticipation of a new model coming out later this year.

Though I’ve long thought a mid-size tablet could be an appealing product, most people haven’t seemed to find the idea very convincing. I suspect some might start to question their opinions, however, as the best argument in favor of a smaller iPad has just been made. By Google.

Among the legacies of David Foster Wallace, the pioneering
postmodernist who produced influential essays, short stories and
the novel “Infinite Jest” before his 2008 suicide, count this:
Antonin Scalia, author. Or, at least, co-author of “Reading
Law,” which the justice discusses today with The Wall Street
Journal.

“He was a very personable fellow,” Justice Scalia says of Mr.
Wallace in an interview. “As co-Snoots, we got along very
well,” he adds, using a term Mr. Wallace popularized for those
whose taste in diction runs to the persnickety. According to a
2001 Wallace essay, it could stand for “Syntax Nudniks of Our
Time.”

Interesting find by Yoni Heisler at iOnApple: photos of a decade-old Apple tablet prototype, revealed during the course of Jony Ive’s deposition in the Apple-Samsung case. Matt Buchanan found better color photos at Buzzfeed.

While many major technology vendors have overcome their reluctance
to making a public showing at the conference, Apple, now the
world’s most valuable company, has had no problem snubbing a
community whose aim is to unearth its vulnerabilities.

That will change Thursday when Dallas De Atley, manager of
Apple’s platform security team, is scheduled to give a
presentation on key security technologies within iOS, the
operating system for iPhones and iPads. Trey Ford, Black Hat’s
general manager, said it will be the first time an Apple
representative has taken the stage at Black Hat or its sibling
conference, DefCon.

Personally, I’m pleased that, if Ichiro had to go, he wound up on
the Yankees. The Yankees have as good a shot at the World Series
as anybody, and Ichiro’s never played in anything even close to
that environment, on and off the field. I hope he gets his ring.
He deserves a ring, if more for his career than for his season,
and while the Yankees are by no means the most rootable bandwagon
in the league, there’s no other playoff contender that boasts an
Ichiro. I think it’s neat that the Orioles, the Pirates, and the
A’s are in playoff contention. It’s fun to root for underdogs. I
don’t feel as strongly about rooting for underdogs as I feel about
rooting for Ichiro. I always need a reason to root for somebody,
and there’s no reason better than this one.

Monday, 23 July 2012

With a few keystrokes, the suspect, James E. Holmes, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun — an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites — in the four months before the shooting, according to the police. It was pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon.

Dead Trigger, a zombie FPS for smartphones from the makers of
Shadowgun, is now free to download on Android thanks to rampant
piracy on the platform. In a statement on Facebook, developer
Madfinger Games says that even at $0.99, the piracy rate on
Android devices was “unbelievably high.”

The iOS version costs just one buck — let’s make this a good day for Madfinger and buy it.

Apple Inc’s new iPhone will drop the wide dock connector used in
the company’s gadgets for the best part of a decade in favor of a
smaller one, a change likely to annoy the Apple faithful but which
could be a boon for accessory makers.

Regarding the headline: awful pun, and it’s a mistake to call the next iPhone the “iPhone 5”. We learned that last year.

Regarding the article: Apple is already abandoning its own only-a-decade-old proprietary adaptor for something better and smaller; PC notebooks still ship with huge 25-year-old VGA ports. Every time I bring this up, the VGA defenders argue that of course notebooks need to ship with VGA ports, added thickness be damned, because the world is full of VGA-only projectors. But the world is also full of Apple 30-pin dock connector cables and accessories. This is how progress is made.

Update: And “Apple faithful”? Really? What other company has its customers described as “faithful”? Seriously.

The Justice Department released a document today that
characterized criticism by Apple and publishers of a controversial
price-fixing settlement as “self-serving” and ill-founded. The
Department also pointed to recent ventures by Google and Microsoft
as evidence that the e-book market is thriving and that Amazon’s
dominant position has been overstated.

I’ll bet Amazon sells more e-books in a day than Microsoft and Google combined do in a month. Not that sales numbers alone disprove the DOJ’s argument, but let’s not kid ourselves that Microsoft or Google have yet made a dent in the e-book market.

Nicely done, and cleverly works around the fact that the Nexus 7 only networks with Wi-Fi. I wonder, though, how many people will be left with the wrong impression — that the Nexus 7 does support cellular networking?

Michael Critz has updated his list of fonts to include those added in the (still in beta) iOS 6. Notable additions: Avenir and Symbol. (Avenir is the typeface used throughout the new Maps app. And it’s worth noting that Palm used (uses?) a custom version of Avenir as the system font in WebOS.)

Gartner is getting more than its fair share of attention today for
a controversial series of blog posts on Windows 8 from research
director Gunnar Berger, who argues that the Windows 8 experience
will be “bad” on a non-touch-enabled device.

I have one question. Why does anyone pay attention to Gartner,
which has been trolling IT professionals for as long as I’ve
been in the industry?

Just for grins, I went back and looked up some of Gartner’s more
spectacularly confident and wrong-headed predictions. Here are
some of their greatest hits. Er, I mean misses.

Points like this one get quickly shot down by folks because people have been wanting to be the first to call Microsoft’s downfall for years. But this time, I think we’re actually seeing it. You can disagree, of course. But I’m not writing this out of some misguided hatred for Microsoft. I’m writing it to have it on record because I believe I’m right. Time will tell, obviously.

Friday, 20 July 2012

My thanks to Procreate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Procreate is an excellent illustration app designed specifically for the iPad. It blends traditional and digital media with over 45 finely crafted brushes, an incredible smudge tool, and a gallery with artwork stacks.

Procreate is a serious tool, and seriously awesome. It’s top-tier in the “yes, the iPad is for creation” example category. Get it today on the App Store for just $4.99.

That James Holmes is insane, few may doubt. Our gun laws are also insane, but many refuse to make the connection. The United States is one of few developed nations that accepts the notion of firearms in public hands. In theory, the citizenry needs to defend itself. Not a single person at the Aurora, Colo., theater shot back, but the theory will still be defended.

The iPhone 3GS is now being offered for $180 on India’s Aircel carrier, with a postpaid commitment of just $55 for a year of unlimited data. That makes the total cost for the phone $236, which is one of the lowest we’ve seen for an iPhone anywhere.

In any case, Penn’s whole career is basically a long string of massaging, manipulating, or ignoring the data in order to produce the conclusion that his own preferences are popular. It’s a very, very good thing that he isn’t in the West Wing right now.

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Google has just released the details of its second-quarter
earnings: $12.21 billion in total consolidated revenue, around
$1.25 billion of which came from Motorola Mobility, now officially
owned by Google.

Microsoft Corp. has hired Mark Penn as corporate vice president for strategic and special projects, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer as the company readies new offerings for the tablet-computer market.

Penn, 58, was the worldwide CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and CEO of the polling firm Penn Schoen Berland LLC, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said in a statement today. Penn will focus on key consumer initiatives, Microsoft said.

A pollster. I think this bodes terribly for Microsoft. Polling works for electoral politics because everything is short-term. Elections really only heat up a few months in advance. (Penn was highly influential in the Clinton administration.)

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that
to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. It
took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given
customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer
they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them — not
something they’d want now.”

The message I take away from this hiring is that Steve Ballmer doesn’t know what to do, and he’s hoping polling will give him the answers. That’s how you wind up skating to where the puck was, not where it’s going to be.

Verizon just finished its conference call, and had a few details
to share about iPhone and Android sales, Galaxy S III performance,
and the immediate impact of the “Share Anything” plans. Verizon
sold 2.7 million iPhones, down from the 3.2 million it sold last
quarter — it also sold 2.9 million Android devices, 2.5 million
of which run on Verizon’s LTE network. It’s not terribly
surprising to see the iPhone sales start to slow as we get closer
to the next iPhone launch, and the Galaxy S III should help
Android maintain that advantage next quarter.

Interesting numbers. Verizon is pretty much done selling non-LTE smartphones, except for the iPhone. Those numbers make me think this year’s new iPhone almost has to support LTE.

I think it’s safe to say that, even three years later, the
iPhone 3GS still has a draw, especially for ‘free’. And Apple
is still very much looking to tap into the pre-paid phone market.
Here’s a thought: what if Apple were to cut the iPhone 4 from
the lineup, instead of the iPhone 3GS?

The iPhone ‘next’ would be the flagship, the iPhone 4S would
offer Siri and take the place of the 4 in the pricing lineup, and
the 3GS would remain ‘free’ on contract. But, if the prices
were right, Apple could expand the 3GS from a contract device to
an off-contract pre-paid model that might finally give the company
a horse in the developing nations race.

My guess is that if the 3GS stays around, the lineup would work like this: new iPhone at the top of the market, the 4S slides down to $99 on contract, the 4 slides down to free with a contract, and the 3GS is sold around the world as a low cost (by iPhone standards at least) pre-paid device. So AT&T wouldn’t even carry the 3GS anymore, they’d just have the 4 as their “free” iPhone, where the word free gets wrapped in dick quotes because it’s only free with an expensive two-year contract.

The big thing to remember about the iPhone 4 is that it’s the first CDMA iPhone. No way it’s going to disappear from the lineup, because now Apple could offer a “free” iPhone on Verizon and Sprint, too.

Speaking of Microsoft, Gray Knowlton from the Office team has a long piece on the touch-focused aspects of the new Office 2013:

In this post I’ll walk you through the thinking, engineering
process and design framework we used to reimagine these
experiences for touch.

They’ve obviously put a ton of thought into this. The question is, do you need to read a 4,000-word explainer to understand how it works? From a user’s perspective, the design process is meaningless, especially for touch interfaces. You see it, you touch it — that’s it. And if that doesn’t work, it’s a failed design.

Speaking of ill-considered government regulators, New York Senator Chuck Schumer wants the DOJ to drop its price-fixing suit against Apple:

The suit will restore Amazon to the dominant position atop the
e-books market it occupied for years before competition arrived in
the form of Apple. If that happens, consumers will be forced to
accept whatever prices Amazon sets. […]

The Justice Department lawsuit is also unsettling from a broader
perspective. As our economy transitions to digital platforms, we
should be celebrating and supporting industries that find ways to
adapt and grow. By developing a pricing model that made e-book
sales work for them, publishers did just that.

He said the investigation will also focus on charges that
Microsoft allows only its own Internet Explorer browser to be
installed on devices running Windows 8 on Windows RT tablets with
British chipmaker ARM’s chips.

So Apple can do it with iOS but Microsoft can’t with Windows RT, despite the fact that the iPad and iPhone are selling tens of millions of units per quarter and there is yet to ship a single Windows RT device?

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Apple Inc. was ordered by a judge to publish a notice on its U.K.
website and in British newspapers alerting people to a ruling that
Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy designs for the iPad.

The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that
Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered
designs, Judge Colin Birss said today. It should be posted on
Apple’s U.K. home page for six months and published in several
newspapers and magazines to correct any impression the South
Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product, Birss said.

I can’t figure out how Apple will play this one. They have to comply with the law, but, I just can’t see Apple paying for ads that even mention Samsung, let alone doing so in a way that absolves them of copying the iPad.

An import ban on Motorola Android devices ordered by the US International Trade Commission is scheduled to take effect tomorrow. Motorola Mobility says it has a plan to make sure its Android phones and tablets remain available to US consumers—but the company isn’t revealing just what that plan is.

The ITC ordered the import ban two months ago, after ruling that 18 Motorola Mobility products infringe a Microsoft patent.

You don’t hear nearly as much about this Microsoft-Motorola patent pissing match as you do Apple-Samsung, probably for the obvious reason that Microsoft and Motorola are both mobile also-rans.

Japanese liquid-crystal-display makers Sharp Corp. and Japan Display Inc. — a new company that combined three Japanese electronics makers’ display units — as well as South Korea’s LG Display Co. are currently mass producing panels for the next iPhone using so-called in-cell technology, the people said.

The technology integrates touch sensors into the LCD, making it unnecessary to have a separate touch-screen layer. The absence of the layer, usually about half-a-millimeter thick, not only makes the whole screen thinner, but improves the quality of displayed images, said DisplaySearch analyst Hiroshi Hayase.

We’ll see how this turns out, but my guess is that she’s going to turn Yahoo into more of a Google rival, not a Google partner. (I don’t think this is anything like Stephen Elop leaving Microsoft for the CEO gig at Nokia, and then turning Nokia into a major Microsoft partner — but we’ll see.)

Yahoo is hopelessly behind in mobile. No way they’re going to have their own mobile phone platform. But why not make them into more of a partner with Apple as a mobile content provider? Apple already uses Yahoo for weather, stocks, and, in Siri on iOS 6 betas, sports. Emphasize that even more.

I’ve long suspected that Mayer preferred the iPhone to Android as a user. She was into Instagram while it was iPhone-only. She’s sent multiple tweets — September 2011, June of this year — using Twitter for iPhone. And her husband just tweeted that he’s switching to the iPhone from BlackBerry.

Monday, 16 July 2012

The appointment of Ms. Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google
and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered
a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years
to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like
Google and Facebook.

Ms. Mayer, 37, had for years been responsible for the look and
feel of Google’s most popular products: the famously unadorned
white search homepage, Gmail, Google News and Google Images.

Huge challenge for Mayer, but a nice scoop for Yahoo. I liked Google a lot better back when it seemed like Mayer was more influential there. It would be great to see her turn things around at Yahoo.

The price of Nokia Corp.’s flagship Lumia 900 Windows phone has been
cut in half in the critical U.S. market, a little more than three
months after the launch of the smartphone at AT&T Inc. stores.

“This move is a normal strategy that is put in place during the life
cycle of most phones,” Nokia spokesman Doug Dawson said in an email.
It “allows a broader consumer base to buy this flagship device at a
more accessible price.”

Totally normal. Nothing to see here. Everything is great.

Sunday, 15 July 2012

Ben Kuchera, now reporting for The Penny Arcade Report, throwing some cold water on Ouya, a Kickstarter project to build a cheap “open” game console based on Android:

I asked specifically
about the ambition of this product, and my misgivings about the
goal of a March launch. “We continue to march toward that date,” I
was told via email. No further details were given. […]

It’s likewise important to note that the company refuses to
confirm the existence of a single game that will run on the OUYA
hardware. I asked if they could confirm a single game for the
platform. “Not at this time,” I was told. “We are obviously
talking to developers behind the scenes but feel that its too
early to announce.”

Saturday, 14 July 2012

Friday, 13 July 2012

My thanks to Harvest for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Harvest is a painless, elegantly-designed time-tracker built for teams and creative professionals. Use it to log billable hours and see where your business spends its time. Harvest has a great website, and they have terrific native apps for the Mac and iOS too — apps that not only look great but make it easier than ever to track your time. Reporting, invoicing — it’s all there.

Only Apple could get away with charging a $400 premium for a
feature that no one needs, few people will notice, doesn’t work
with most apps, and was not on anyone’s wish list until the
company announced it last month.

Apple’s ultra high-resolution Retina display may be a valuable
innovation on the iPhone and iPad - but it’s a solution in search
of a problem on the MacBook Pro. Until Apple unveiled the new
machine at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, no
one thought the resolution on current MacBook Pros was
insufficient.

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, featuring special guest star Dan “Rhymes with Homer” Frommer. Topics include the future of Twitter (and third-party Twitter client apps), the purportedly imminent iPad Mini and the tablet market in general, and the state of technology media. (R.I.P. “America’s Favorite Two-Star Podcast” slogan — the show is now rated three-stars.)

A hack that lets iOS users trick the App Store into giving them
in-app purchases for free has gone public, potentially costing app
makers revenue and causing Apple a major headache. […]

Alexey V. Borodin of Russia built the in-app purchase hack, which
requires several steps — including installing bogus certificates
on your device, and using a specially-crafted DNS server. Those
ingredients combine to fool apps into believing that they’re
communicating with the App Store, when they’re actually going to
a Web server that pretends to the App Store instead. Borodin told
Macworld that his exploit works in part by faking — or
“spoofing” — the code receipts that Apple issues for in-app
purchases which developers use for validation, with the iOS
device configured to mistakenly believe that those receipts are
coming directly from Apple.

Dalrymple has a short “we’re on the case” statement from Apple PR. Friedman has a good interview with Borodin, worth reading through to the end. Be sure not to have anything in your mouth when you get to the closing paragraph.

Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the
F.B.I. who spent the last seven months examining the Sandusky
scandal at Penn State, issued a damning conclusion Thursday:

“The most senior officials at Penn State had shown a “total and
consistent disregard” for the welfare of children, had worked
together to actively conceal Mr. Sandusky’s assaults, and had done
so for one central reason: fear of bad publicity. That publicity,
Mr. Freeh said Thursday, would have hurt the nationally ranked
football program, Mr. Paterno’s reputation as a coach of high
principles, the Penn State “brand” and the university’s ability to
raise money as one of the most respected public institutions in
the country.

It breaks my heart knowing so much of what happened not only could have been prevented, but should have. The NCAA should shut down Penn State’s football program, and the surviving leaders of the university should be charged with crimes.

Still speaking of those Nielsen smartphone numbers, Horace Dediu notes that they paint a gloomy picture for Nokia:

If we then use comScore’s figure for total smartphone users (110
million) then the data would suggest that there are 330K Lumias in
use in the US. This would have been accumulated over a sales
period of about four months.

If you look at the data (charted accurately, as it is on Asymco) it paints a damning picture of Windows Phone as a whole, not just for Nokia. Windows Phone 7 has less than half the share of the long-since-abandoned Windows Mobile — 1.3 to 2.9 percent, respectively.

Nielsen’s numbers are for “subscribers”, which I take to mean “smartphones in active use this quarter”, not “new smartphones sold this quarter”. So there are more people still holding on to years-old Windows Mobile phones than there are using new Windows Phone 7 phones.

Élyse Betters at 9to5Mac flags a horrendously inaccurate chart from Nielsen, purporting to show U.S. smartphone market share broken down both by OS and handset maker. Nielsen shamelessly under-emphasized the areas for Android and iOS and over-emphasized the areas for every other platform.

We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were
disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the
EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting
today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.

Digg Inc., a social-media pioneer once valued at more than $160
million, is selling for the deeply discounted price of about
$500,000, three people familiar with the matter said. […]

Digg confirmed Thursday it sold its brand, website and technology
to Betaworks. The price is a pittance for a company that raised
$45 million from prominent investors including Facebook investor
Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Inc. founder Reid Hoffman,
and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, took to the
stage at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference earlier today
to stir up the crowd and discuss Apple’s idea of a post-PC era.
“Apple makes great hardware,” admitted Turner, “the reality is in
the OS we see things differently.” Turner went on to discuss the
company’s upcoming Mountain Lion operating system and some mixed
press reaction to the future of OS X. “We believe that Apple has
it wrong,” says turner. “They’ve talked about it being the post-PC
era, they talk about the tablet and PC being different, the
reality in our world is that we think that’s completely
incorrect.”

Turner then went on to describe this new era as a “PC+” period,
one that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted back in 1999.
“We actually believe Windows 8 is the new era for the PC plus,”
says Turner. “We believe with a single push of a button you can
move seamlessly in and out of both worlds. We believe you can have
touch, a pen, a mouse, and a keyboard.”

Apple’s post-PC vision isn’t about input devices — mice, keyboards, pens, whatever. It’s about exposed complexity. Tim Carmody argues in a follow-up at The Verge that Apple’s “post-PC” and Microsoft’s “PC-plus” aren’t that far apart. I think that remains to be seen. With the iPad, Apple has eliminated large amounts of complexity. With Windows 8, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft has eliminated complexity, or merely hidden it behind a Metro veneer.

I think the Steve Jobs quote Microsoft should be focused upon far predates this post-PC stuff. Go back to 1997:

“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft
has to lose,” Jobs said. “We have to embrace the notion that for
Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. If others are
going to help us, that’s great. Because we need all the help we
can get. […] The era of setting this up as a competition between
Apple and Microsoft is over.”

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the
retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of
Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried
and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is
investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and
same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull
that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put
it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

There are still a lot of questions about this alleged Yahoo Voices
data breach — including whether there was a reason behind the
breach in the first place — but Yahoo has now officially
confirmed that the data did in fact come from its servers, and
that “approximately” 400,000 email addresses and passwords have
been leaked in plain text online.

Note that the numbers include “desk-based PCs and mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablets such as the iPad.” So they included everything that would make the PC companies look as good as possible. Imagine if they included the iPad in Apple’s numbers.

Classic disruption: the old guard doesn’t even acknowledge the upstart.

“Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our
environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest
energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy
Star 5.2,” Apple representative Kristin Huguet, told The Loop. “We
also lead the industry by reporting each product’s greenhouse gas
emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other
important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as
removal of toxic materials.”

Apple would have been better served by issuing a statement like this before it turned into a controversy. And even here, Apple is not addressing the specific concern regarding the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, which is recyclability.

Tuesday, 10 July 2012

Fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner as shown in the Blade
Runner bonus feature Signs of the Times: Graphic Design. The
covers were created by production illustrator Tom Southwell in
1980-1981 and appeared in the background on a magazine stand in
the city streets.

In reality, the iPhone has already been around longer — 2,009
days since Steve Jobs unveiled it on Jan. 9, 2007 — than the
1,904-day period between the iPod announcement on Oct. 23, 2001
and the iPhone Macworld keynote.

Does it make sense to carry two, three, or more portable
com­put­ing de­vices around? Se­lect from:

Reg­u­lar-size lap­top; say 15"-screen or higher.

Skinny lap­top i.e. Air at 13" or even 11".

Big tablet at ~10" as in cur­rent iPads.

One-han­der tablet, typ­i­cally at 7".

Hand­set, 3½"-5".

This iPad Mini stuff has me thinking the same thoughts. Me, I’m an 11-inch MacBook Air man. But I’ll admit it feels a bit silly to pack a bag with both an 11-inch Air and an iPad. Two devices of nearly the same size. But, when traveling, I really do wind up using both of them. (Insert the argument for the Microsoft Surface here.) And I never go anywhere without my iPhone.

So if I’m going to pack an 11-inch Air and an iPhone, and one more device, I can definitely see the case that a smaller tablet makes more sense as the device in the middle. But, an 11-inch Air and a 9.7-inch iPad (3) combined still weigh only 3.82 pounds. The new MacBook Pro with Retina Display — by far the lightest 15-inch notebook Apple has ever made — weighs 4.46 pounds. So maybe it’s the people who carry a big notebook who’ll be most tempted to get a smaller iPad, since they’re already carrying more weight. Decisions, decisions.

I think Apple no longer wants to follow the EPEAT recycling
guidelines because they think not following them allows product
designs that will be more compelling for consumers and bring more
value to Apple than their continued participation in EPEAT.

Last month Apple asked that the standards group EPEAT (Electronic
Product Environmental Assessment Tool), which is responsible for
rating the recyclability of electronics products drop it from its
rankings. The group, which is funded by the EPA, complied. It
means that 39 Macs, MacBooks and monitors that were previously
EPEAT certified as causing minimal environmental damage and
promoting maximum recyclability, no longer have the group’s stamp
of approval. In making this move, Apple is signaling that it won’t
let future design decisions be governed by those seeking to uphold
environmental standards.

Speaking of The Next Web, Matthew Panzarino makes the case that Apple’s worldwide content-distribution could seal the deal for an iPad Mini to dominate the small tablet market:

Amazon’s Appstore is available in 1 country in the world, the
U.S. Its movie streaming service? Also US only. You can get
Kindle Edition books in many more countries, so at least there
is that.

Google fares slightly better. Its Google Play Store books are
available in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US.
Movies are available in those countries as well as Japan, France
and Spain. But you can still only purchase movies in the U.S. […]

Notably, Apple’s music, movie, app and book offerings are
available in all 63 countries listed here, aside from Romania,
which gets no movies, bummer.

“They’re going to get sued and they should get sued because I
think a closer look at the record is likely to unearth knowing and
willful misrepresentation,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, the former
president of Apple’s products division and the founder of the
software maker Be, who is now a venture capitalist and blogger in
Palo Alto, Calif. “When the C.E.O. says there’s nothing wrong with
the company as it is, it’s not cautious, it doesn’t make sense.”

Google is reportedly set to pay a $22.5 million fine in relation
to the scandal that broke out when the company was found to have
overridden Safari’s privacy settings, with the potential to track
Internet browsing sessions.

The Wall Street Journal cites company officials “briefed on the
settlement terms” who have revealed that the firm is in line to
pay the highest fine that the FTC has ever imposed on a single
company.

Very surprising that Google, of all companies, what with their “Don’t be evil” motto, would receive the largest ever fine imposed by the FTC.

Maeve Reston, reporting from the line for a Mitt Romney fundraiser in the Hamptons:

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her
name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t
think the common person is getting it,” she said from the
passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach
permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby
sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote
— they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re
lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t
understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems
work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Monday, 9 July 2012

In other words, the estimable businessmen and women at
realinsurance.com.au have been paying SEO companies to spam the
comment sections of sites around the globe. But now Google’s new
search algorithms are making that legacy spam really damaging. So
now they’re sending out cease and desist notices to the victims of
their earlier spamming demanding that they search their archives
and remove their spam.

Twitter set off alarm bells across the web in recent weeks when it
ended its partnership with LinkedIn and reiterated its warning
that it would be cracking down on the terms of its API. The
company didn’t offer any explanation for why it removed tweets
from LinkedIn, but speaking with sources familiar with the
company’s plans, The Verge has learned that major changes are
coming in the next few months which will move Twitter from an open
platform popular among independent developers towards a walled
garden more akin to Facebook.

I can’t think of a more ominous four-word description of Twitter’s future than “More akin to Facebook”. For me, Twitter isn’t just a little bit better because of third-party clients — it’s vastly better because of third-party clients. Whatever it is Twitter is planning, I sure hope it isn’t going to cut third-party clients loose.

Ends up Dan Lyons likes it, too. And one thing all these reviews mention is that the smaller form factor is, in numerous ways, more convenient and comfortable than 10-inch-ish tablets like the you-know-what. Fits in more places, easier to hold in your hand for longer stretches of time. The conclusion everyone is drawing: Apple should make something in this size. (Tim Bray was on the record with this advice in December 2010.) So far so good.

But I think Lyons gets a little nutty with his conclusion:

But what is the point of a portable computer with a 3.5-inch (or
4.3-inch, or 4.7-inch) screen? That device is the one that starts
looking like a “tweener” — caught between embedded/wearable
devices, and tablets.

I can envision a time, maybe not so far from now, when I won’t
carry a “phone” at all. If my Nexus 7 could make phone calls, I’d
be there today.

The maximum size of an “I’ll just carry one device” device is limited by the size of a pants pocket, no? I know Lyons is proposing using a Bluetooth headset to talk, not holding a 7-inch tablet up against his face, but in his proposal he’d still have to carry the 7-inch tablet around with him everywhere, right?

Steve Ballmer has just announced Microsoft’s acquisition of
Perceptive Pixel, a company focused on research, development, and
production of multitouch interfaces. The company is perhaps best
known for the 82-inch multitouch display that Microsoft demoed at
MWC. Jeff Han, Perceptive Pixel founder and new Microsoft
employee, says the display is the “world’s largest true multitouch
and stylus display,” capable of supporting “hundreds of touch
inputs simultaneously.”

The design for three Galaxy tablets doesn’t infringe Apple’s
registered design, Judge Colin Birss said today in London in a
court fight between the world’s two biggest makers of
smartphones. Consumers aren’t likely to get the tablet computers
mixed up, he said.

The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme
simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said.
“They are not as cool.”

Apple and Samsung should just shake hands now and agree that the law has spoken.

You might buy a new phone that’s missing something, thinking, “It
will get better.” No, it won’t. If I were to tell you one thing
about buying technology, it is this: Buy something because you
like what it is right now, not because you think it’s going to
get better, or that one day it’ll be what you really wanted it to
be. It’s kind of like marrying somebody and thinking you’ll change
them and they’ll get better. They might. But they probably won’t.
Over time, you’ll just hate them even more. And yourself, at least
a little.

Great piece, but I think the headline throws it off. Sometimes products do get better — hugely better — thanks to a software update. Think about the original iPhone, which, when iOS 2 hit a year later, gained the ability to run third-party apps. Huge update. But the 1.0 iPhone was already an incredible product.

So I’d say it’s not that “it never gets better”, but rather that you should never buy something that isn’t already — right now, today — good enough.

Eero is a fully binary- and header-compatible dialect of
Objective-C, implemented with a modified version of the
Apple-sponsored LLVM/clang open-source compiler. It features a
streamlined syntax, Python-like indentation, and other features
that improve readability and code safety. It is inspired by
languages such as Smalltalk, Python, and Ruby.

Looks nice, to my eyes.

Saturday, 7 July 2012

My thanks to Doxie Go for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Doxie Go is an award-winning scanner that works anywhere — no computer required — and then syncs to your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and the cloud. Doxie comes with terrific Mac software that makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs, and send scans to other Mac apps like Dropbox, Evernote, Yojimbo, and more. And the hardware is great: small, simple, and unobtrusive. I have one and adore it.

Friday, 6 July 2012

It pleases me to inform you that most browsers implement
window.devicePixelRatio correctly. The property contains the
ratio between physical pixels and dips, and even though some
values appear strange at first, they actually make sense.

The U.S. judge who tossed out one of the biggest court cases
in Apple Inc.’s smartphone technology battle is questioning whether
patents should cover software or most other industries at all.

Richard Posner, a prolific jurist who sits on the 7th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals in Chicago, told Reuters this week that the
technology industry’s high profits and volatility made patent
litigation attractive for companies looking to wound competitors.

Even though it’s a small market today (although don’t forget about the iPad 3), it’s inevitably going to increase substantially in the near future. Don’t you want to get ahead of that? Do you want your site to be ready the first time someone views it on a Retina screen, or are you OK with it looking like garbage for a few years until you happen to buy high-DPI hardware?

Thursday, 5 July 2012

The biggest factor driving Twitter today is that it wants to
remain an independent company. There were previous opportunities
to become part of Google or Facebook or whatever, but now Twitter
wants to remain its own property. To become a strong, independent
company, Twitter must build a large, profitable business, sooner
than later — or the dream is over. It’s possible, but it will
require change, which makes people uncomfortable.

But the Nexus tablet is sweet. Its hardware and software
smoothness rival Apple’s, and its luxury humiliates the Kindle
Fire. In short, it’s possible that this tablet may finally help
solve Google’s chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe once it becomes
popular, people will finally start writing decent apps for it, and
more movie and music companies will come to the Google Play store.

Despite its high-tech sounding name, i2z is simply a Texas shell
company run by a California lawyer that is targeting internet and
travel companies including Kayak, Google, Yelp and Microsoft.
Under i2z’s business model, known as patent trolling, firms that
don’t make anything collect patents in order to extract licensing
settlements from companies that do.

In a new twist, trolls have begun laying in wait for start-ups to
receive funding before pouncing. That is what happened to
hand-crafted goods marketplace Etsy earlier this year.

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

Long story short, there’s still one open sponsorship spot for this week’s The Talk Show, recording tomorrow (which may well be today by the time you read this) and airing Friday. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to the best podcast audience in the world, get in touch.

Update: OK, this week’s open spot is sold, but there are still a few openings for the remaining shows in July.

If Apple were to launch a $200–300 7.8-inch iPad, they’d probably
sell a ton of them for the holiday season — which means they’d
need to start ramping up production pretty soon, if not already.
If they were doing that, we’d probably see legitimate-looking
parts leaked from the supply chain by now, but as far as I know,
we haven’t.

Actually, I’ve seen at least one purported leak: a month ago at a site called ZooGue. No idea if it’s legitimate, but I like it. It hearkens back to the original iPhone with its flat back and round sides.

This piece by Horace Dediu explains — perfectly — what I was talking about this week with my iPhone disruption piece. Except what Dediu shows is that the disruption started in 2004, three years before the iPhone shipped. But the introduction of iOS accelerated this disruption dramatically.

Bottom line: In 1984, DOS PCs outsold the Mac 6-to-1. By 2004, the ratio of Windows PCs to Macs sold peaked at 56-to-1. Today it’s under 20-to-1 and still dropping — but if you include iOS devices, it’s down to 2-to-1. Staggering.

Dediu’s graphs are the best illustration I’ve ever seen of the waxing and waning of Microsoft’s Windows hegemony.

Con. Shooting with camera can be awkward. No Adobe Flash. No
camera flash. No expanded storage.

Baig called out the iPad 3’s lack of Flash Player support in the article itself, too. No mention of Flash whatsoever in the Nexus 7 review. Funny how the lack of Flash Player support was only a problem with Apple devices.

Speaking with The Inquirer, a Google spokesperson confirmed that
the Nexus 7 won’t feature these three categories, which will
remain an exclusive in US for the time being. They said, “The UK
version will feature all of the options currently available in the
UK Play store”, which means users of the Nexus 7 will be limited
in their choices movies, apps, games and books.

I wonder if the iPad Mini will have music, magazines, and TV shows in the U.K.?

If Apple can make a 9.7 inch iPad for the same price Apple’s
competitors can make a 7 inch tablet, how much would it cost Apple
to make a 7 inch tablet?

It’s hard to imagine a $200 7 inch iPad having huge margins, but
it was hard to imagine a $500 9.7 inch iPad having huge margins in
2010. Now the entry-level 9.7 inch iPad 2 sells for $400.

I bet Apple could make a $199 iPad Mini and turn a profit on it — especially with a $249 version sitting next to it with double the storage. It’s that simple. If Apple thinks people would buy a smaller cheaper iPad and that they can turn a profit making them, they’ll do it. No reason to overthink it.

Keep in mind too that Amazon still only sells the Kindle Fire in the U.S., and Google is only selling the Nexus 7 in three countries — and outside the U.S. it won’t have music, magazines, or TV shows. Even if this iPad Mini doesn’t ship until October, Apple will likely beat Amazon and Google to market in much of the world.

Apple Inc. plans to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad by year-end, two
people with knowledge of the plans said, to help maintain
dominance of the tablet market as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
prepare competing handheld devices.

The new model will have a screen that’s 7 inches to 8 inches
diagonally, less than the current 9.7-inch version, said the
people, who asked not to be identified because Apple hasn’t made
its plans public. The product, which Apple may announce by
October, won’t have the high-definition screen featured on the
iPad that was released in March, one of the people said.

Here’s the logic behind such a display. Displays aren’t manufactured at their finished size; rather, they’re made on big sheets, and then cut to size. I believe the iPad Mini (or whatever it’s going to be called) uses the same display as the iPhone 3GS. So instead of cutting these sheets into 3.5-inch 480 × 320 displays for the iPhone 3GS, they’ll cut them into 7.85-inch 1024 × 768 displays for the smaller iPad. Same exact display technology, though — display technology that Apple has been producing at scale ever since the original iPhone five years ago. These are displays Apple knows they can produce efficiently and in enormous quantities. All they have to do is cut them into bigger pieces.

And then for developers, the iPad Mini acts just like an iPad 1 or 2: same number of pixels, just a little smaller physically. It’s not a new target.

Apple Inc.’s component suppliers in Asia are preparing for mass
production in September of a tablet computer with a smaller screen
than the iPad, people familiar with the situation said, suggesting
a launch for the device is near. Two of the people said that the
tablet’s screen will likely be smaller than eight inches. The
iPad’s screen measures 9.7 inches, unchanged since the first model
was released in 2010.

Officials at the component suppliers, who declined to be named,
said this week that Apple has told them to prepare for mass
production of the smaller tablet.

Tuesday, 3 July 2012

Visitors to sites like 9to5Mac certainly are not representative of the iOS user base as a whole, but it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless. Here at DF, 7.75 percent of iOS visitors yesterday were on iOS 6. (83 percent were on 5.1.1, 5 percent on 5.1, 1.6 percent on 5.0.1, and all other versions of iOS were well under half a percent.)

More interesting to me is that iOS now accounts for just under one-third of DF web traffic. These are numbers the past month:

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 007 film franchise, The
Barbican sits down with set designer Sir Ken Adam, Aston Martin’s
Head of Design, and the designers and the makers of the legendary
Golden Gun to talk about the creation of the iconic world
inhabited by Bond.

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known
as “stack ranking” — a program that forces every unit to declare
a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good
performers, average, and poor — effectively crippled Microsoft’s
ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee
I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most
destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out
untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a
team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no
matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great
review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to
get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It
leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather
than competing with other companies.”

Monetate, which analyzes more than 100 million online shopping experiences, said that in the first quarter of 2012, tablet traffic to commerce sites hit 6.52 percent, overtaking smartphones (5.35 percent) for the first time. In the last year, tablets’ traffic increased 348 percent while smartphones visits grew by 117 percent over the same period.

Which tablets, though?

Almost all of the traffic (95 percent) was from the iPad, said Monetate.

So why is the headline about “tablets”?

Monday, 2 July 2012

Good piece by Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. Same goes for Andy Rubin’s public admission that the Nexus 7 has “no margin” — why admit that publicly? Not just because it surely annoys their OEM partners who are trying to build Android devices for a profit, but why be proud of this at all?

We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade
to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is
running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify
to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131
markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for
free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after
your upgrade.

There is a significant shift going on this year, much more
significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile. It is most
noticeable in games, social networking, music, and news, but it is
happening across the board and it presents both great opportunity
and great challenges.

Mobile native services like Foursquare and Instagram have the most
to gain from this transition. Big feature rich web apps like
Facebook and Google have the most to lose from this transition.

A sea change is indeed underway, but Wilson either misses it or is being obtuse. Companies Wilson mentions: Microsoft, Google, RIM, Facebook, Yahoo. Not mentioned: Apple.

There’s no mystery here. We’re talking about two platforms: iOS and Android. (Microsoft is doing its best to join that party with Windows 8.) It’s not “mobile vs. the web”. The web is a huge part of what people do on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. It’s post-PC vs. PC, in Apple’s parlance. Modern vs. traditional computing devices. Pretty much every instance of “mobile” could be replaced by “modern” in Wilson’s piece, and it would read better.

By the numbers, Nokia looks like it’s on a similar trajectory, but there’s one key difference: Nokia has their next-generation phones on the market. It doesn’t seem like the Lumia handsets are setting the world on fire, but at least they have a chance. With RIM’s next-generation phones not coming until 2013, they’ve got no chance.

Paul Kafasis on the Tampa Bay Rays’ fake throwback uniforms. I don’t mind that they made up a fictional uniform, but it’s a shame they didn’t do something more than just change the colors of those classic ’70s Padre uniforms.

Edge swiping to switch between tabs works great and hopefully will
make its way into other iOS apps in the future. Switching between
tabs on the iPad is even better, as you can switch between
multiple tabs with a single swipe. Opening a new tab instantly
refreshes the tab, showing you the old version of the page in
black and white until the new one is available. Sounds pretty
great. So, why switch back to Safari? Here’s why.

I agree with pretty much everything in this review. Chrome’s experience is all about the omnibox. Me, I actually make pretty heavy use of bookmarks (and bookmarklets), so it makes a big difference to me that Safari puts those one tap away. Especially on the phone, I prefer tapping to typing.